An inbound link is one from someone else’s website to some content on your website.
This is good because if that someone has a a popular website, then prospective customers may follow the link.
From Google’s perspective, the number of these inbound links to your site and the authority (or trustworthiness) of the sites which link back to your site are a good indicator of how trustworthy your site is and therefore how high up Google’s results pages your website should rank.
An outbound link is one which points from one (or more) of your web pages to a piece of content that is on a different website.
These outbound links are used so that people can easily find their way to important nuggets of information on other parts of the internet.
Because we typically only link to sites we can trust, when we link to another website we are effectively telling Google to trust that site too.
When people are talking about links (if you don’t know what a link is you can find out by clicking here) they often talk about something called anchor text.
Anchor text is the bit of text that you click to follow the link. Because the text effectively ‘holds’ the link in place on a page, it is described as anchor text.
Anchor text often gives you information about the page you will land on when it’s clicked, for example – Noisy Little Monkey’s Google Plus Page is a link to our Google+ page. Neat, huh? Click here takes you to the same page, but the anchor text isn’t descriptive of the landing page.
Since descriptive anchor text is the most useful for people, it seems that Google tries to use it to understand what a page is about. To see how important the words you use as anchor text are, type click here into a Google search. The site that has the most links that use the anchor text “click here” is number one in the results, which right now is the page for Adobe Reader.
The term “reciprocal link” describes the practice of exchanging links between two or more websites. A ‘you link to me, I’ll link to you’ type situation.
This practice is often employed in the misguided belief that Google will rank both sites higher. At best, this is simply a waste of time. At worst, Google may penalise your site because you are employing spammy techniques.
Reciprocal links should only be employed when there is a genuine relationship between the two sites, for example – we link to Bison Grid all the time, because they make awesome online applications and they link to us because we’re ace at online marketing. Our business services complement each other, so each business recommends their customers to use the other.
Online, this relationship is underpinned by the fact we talk to each other on Twitter, we both like each other’s Facebook pages, we run seminars together… Google is able to see all this activity which demonstrates our ‘real world’ relationship and Google can also see that we’re not linking our sites to get more ‘Google juice’.
An internal link is a link from one part of your website to another part of your website.
The main menu on your website is probably a good place to find internal links to other pages on your website because typically, all the links in your main menu will point to internal pages.
These internal links are used so that people can easily find their way to important nuggets of information buried deep in your site.
Google also looks at these internal links to try to understand which parts of your website you believe to be most important. So, try not to have a link to your Terms & Conditions in the footer of every page on your website as this might lead Google to believe it’s the most important page on your site because you’re always linking to it!
A “linking domain” is the main address (often where the homepage lives) of a website that has a page (or more) which links to your website.
For example, our friends at TXM Recruit link to us from this page: http://www.txmrecruit.co.uk/about/partners.aspx
Therefore the linking domain is www.txmrecruit.co.uk because that is the domain that holds the page links to our website.
If there were hundreds of pages on www.txmrecruit.co.uk which all linked to www.noisylittlemonkey.com it would give us hundreds of inbound links, but only from one a linking domain.
It makes sense to have links from a wide variety of domains to demonstrate to Google that your website is trusted by a number of different organisations.
If you’re considering using a “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO) company to build links for you it’s worth remembering that the best way to get quality links from trusted websites is by having unique, fresh, well researched content. If your website is only talking about your products and services, then an SEO company is only going to be able to build links from sites that will link out without checking the quality of the web page they are linking to. These sites often link to anyone and everyone who asks, for a fee. They’re often called link farms.
We’d recommend you avoid link farms and any SEO company that recommend you use them, because:
As we say, produce unique, interesting, helpful content for your customers. Then people will link to it without needing an SEO company. Simple!
We’ve been asked a question on our Facebook page about links and why they may or may not be important to a website’s position in Google’s results (AKA “SERPs”), so we’ve put together a number of definitions that will help you understand links – particularly if you’re just starting out on the journey of marketing your business online.
We’ll start with the basics:
A link is a part (or parts) of a web page that you click to go somewhere else. “Somewhere else” may be another part of that web page, another page on that same website, or another website entirely.
If links are contained in a portion of text they are often underlined in blue: like this.
But links can be contained in images, video and all manner of things.
Basically, anything you can click on a website which takes you to another place is a link.
Here are some useful links for your next steps…
What is anchor text?
What is an internal link?
What is an outbound link?
What is an inbound link?
What is a reciprocal link?
What is a linking domain?
Like all great ideas, it came to us over a cup of coffee one morning. Jon does loads of seminars for organisation like BRAVE in Bristol and the North Somerset Enterprise Agency; he does them because he loves SEO and small businesses but hates people being ripped off with bad advice. He also likes to talk and wave his arms around in front of an audience . . .
However, having given them a half day of brilliant advice, most people want a website that works and isn’t too expensive, and we just didn’t have anything to offer them. Admittedly we know loads of brilliant marketeers, designers and coders, but add them all together and it’s hard to quote for a website that costs under £5,000.
With our corporate clients, we always recommend using WordPress for their blogs and the news sections of their website. It’s easy to use, reliable and loved by Google. Add to that mix some coffee and a creative 15 minutes and SEO Pack was born.
SEO Pack is a low cost, cut down version of Noisy Little Monkey’s on-page SEO services built into a WordPress template site. We take your online marketing objectives and what you like design wise into consideration and then recommend one of the many WordPress themes available. We then customise that theme using your copy and images, building in the search term research as we go. Once we’ve done the customisation, then the site is handed over to you with training, lots of useful reference materials and details of your Google Analytics account.
It’s called SEO Pack because it’s a package of information and services, not just a website. We’ve taken frequently asked questions and answers, translated them out of geek-speak and into a form that will enable you to take control of your website.
SEO Pack costs £2,000 +VAT, or just £100 a month for two years, and for that you have a website, fully optimised for search that you can update and add to yourself (otherwise known as fully content managed website).
If you need additional services – like design, consultancy or additional training – then there is a pick and mix of additional services available.
SERPs (when you’re talking about search engines, NOT pensions) stands for Search Engine Results Pages.
Want to see an example?
Click this link and you’ll see the SERPs for the query noisy little monkey - You’ll be sent to Google UK in a new window.
I was recently asked the question ‘ Which websites do you go to for all the latest news in your industry, or about new SEO techniques?’
It’s a really good question… When I first discovered the world of SEO I would spend hours scouring the web looking for useful blogs and websites so I could digest as much SEO and marketing information as possible. So based on trial, error and my opinion, these are the most valuable SEO blogs/websites out there currently. Some of the blogs you may have heard of, but hopefully you’ll discover one or two you’ve not seen before.
Ok…first up is SEOmoz. The guys over at SEOmoz do a great job of helping individuals answer some of the most common questions in SEO as well as answering very, very technical ones too. If you are just starting out in the world of SEO or maybe you have a site but need to implement some level of SEO they have a great beginners guide to SEO, (which is also available in PDF form), packed full of information and explained very clearly. You can find other beginners guides, but not to this level of detail.
SEOmoz also provide up-to-date techniques and theories via a brilliant video series called ‘White Board Friday’, as well as exceptionally helpful blog posts (often by their user community), which must take hours if not days to complete as they are packed with detail. What is so useful about SEOmoz is they try out new techniques and inform everyone about the results, whether they have worked or not! SEOmoz also provide a whole host of tools, which to fully access you have to pay for, but they give away so much valuable content for free, they have to make a living somehow. 
SEObook was where I spent most of my time learning the fundamentals of SEO and Aaron Wall’s training modules are simply brilliant. A great resource for anyone looking to learn SEO at their own pace!
Similar to SEOMoz you have to pay to use some of the features, but having used SEOBook for a long time, I would highly recommend this site not only for its resources, but also for the level expertise at hand if you need them.
Wiep.net has been around for a long time and is one of those blogs that gets better with age, like a fine cheese. Wiep covers one of the trickiest subjects in the world of SEO, link building. If you think rushing out and buying 10,000 links for £10 is a good idea you might need to read this blog first.
Loads of useful content, and links to other useful resources and with posts going back as far as 2007, it will keep you busy for a while. I recently saw Wiep speak at SearchLove 2011 and his knowledge of link building is far superior to anyone else I have seen talking about link building, and he is a nice guy to boot.
There are hundreds of SEO blogs and websites available on the net, but it’s just a case of sorting the wheat from the chaff and finding blogs that are the most informative, for a vast selection of subjects within the industry. With Wiep.net this rule applies, as there are tons of blogs going into great detail how to generate links, best practices and the like – but Weip’s blog is the best.
Google gives people who are new to SEO a helping hand by having a handy SEO Starter Guide. Guides don’t really come much simpler than this really…Google wants to help optimise your website to rank well in the search engines. The guide includes how to optimise your website for mobile devices, content guides and much more.
Along with the downloadable PDF guide from SEOmoz, this one is another great guide to print out and look through.
The Google Webmaster Central main blog is the place to go to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth for any Google search engine news/ updates. 
Another great blog to visit for all things Google is Matt Cutts blog. Matt is the head of Google’s Webspam team and his blog is packed with videos of Matt answering some of the most common questions he is asked on a monthly basis. His explanations are always simple and to the point, perfect for both beginners and experts alike.
Blind Five Year Old is one of my all-time favourite blogs. They are actually a very reputable SEO company, (I thought it was just a blog for ages!) They don’t just cover subjects on SEO, but also general stuff from PPC, general rants and analytics.
Sometimes the topics talked about regarding SEO are a little technical for beginners but it’s worth having this blog in your arsenal, so when you have some understanding of the more technical stuff you can come back to Blind Five Year Old. If you would like to know why this blog is called Blind Five Year Old you can find out here, as it was one of the first question I asked myself, ‘Why Blind Five Year Old?’ .
There are a handful of blogs that I have to check on a daily basis for fear of missing something out and this next blog just happens to be one of them. Blogstorm is regularly updated by Patrick Altoft who is the Director of Search at a very respectable company called, Branded3.
Like some of the others posted above, Blogstorm covers a range of topics from blogging, SEO and Affiliate Marketing. The main reason why I enjoy blogstorm and find it so valuable is that they cover such a variety of subjects and in such detail too.
If you are thinking of attending a conference whether it is SearchLove, LinkLove, whatever and you see that Patrick Altoft is one of the speakers on the list, go. Patrick is a great conference speaker, and after reading his blog for such a long time, it was nice to finally see him speak last year.
Search Engine Round Table has been about as far back as I can remember, and is still one of the first places I still go to today to keep up-to-date on the latest goings on with search engines. The thing I love about Search Engine Round Table is that as soon as anything changes or there has been an update, someone from Search Engine Round Table has digested what has happened, written a post about it and published it for the world to see.
Sites that do this kind of quick fire reporting are worth their weight in gold, purely because they don’t keep their findings to themselves and are willing to share (for free I might add) with everyone. Again Search Engine Round Table may be a good place to come back to when you have understood some of the fundamental tactics of SEO.
Well there you have it. I hope you find some of the sites I’ve listed as useful as I have over the years.